Quotes about painter
page 3

“You wretch! [Cezanne is portraying the art dealer Vollard who changed his pose during the painter session] You've spoiled the pose. Do I have to tell you again you must sit like an apple? Does an apple move?”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Quote from a conversation in Cézanne's studio in Paris, ca. 1896-98; as quoted in Cezanne, by Ambroise Vollard, Dover publications Inc. New York, 1984, p. 74
Quotes of Paul Cezanne, 1880s - 1890s

Art, Change

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Life, God, People, Truth

“Objects enter into each other... Chardin [French classical still-life painter] was the first to have glimpsed that and rendered the atmosphere of objects... Notice how a light transversal plane straddling the bridge of your nose makes the values more evident to the eye... Well, he noticed that before we did... He neglected nothing. He also perceived that whole encounter in the atmosphere of the tiniest particles, the fine dust of emotion that surrounds objects..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 220 in: 'What he told me – III. The Studio'

Life, Light

“He (Delacroix) turns David [French painter] upside down. His painting is iridescent. Seeing one Constable [famous English landscape painter, admired by French painters, then] is enough to make him understand all the possibilities of landscape, and he too sets up his easel by the sea... And he has a sense of human being, of life in movement, of warmth. Everything moves, every glistens. The light!... There is more warm light in this interior [probably: Delacroix's 'Woman of Algiers'] of his than in all of Corot's landscapes..”

Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) French painter

Source: Quotes of Paul Cezanne, after 1900, Cézanne, - a Memoir with Conversations, (1897 - 1906), p. 196 in: 'What he told me – II. The Louvre'

Life, Understanding, Sense, Light

“Fine Art then, records by idealised imitation the glorious works of good men, whilst it holds those of bad men up to our abhorrence — it gives to posterity their images, either on the tinted canvass or the sculptured marble — it imitates the beautiful effects of nature as seen in the glowing landscape or the rising storm, and perpetuates the appearance of those beauteous gems of the seasons — flowers and fruits, which, though fading whilst the painter catches their tints, yet live after decay by and through his genius.
Industrial Art, on the contrary, aims at the embellishment of the works of man, by and through that power which is given to the artist for the investigation of the beautiful in nature; and in transferring it to the loom, the printing machine, the potter's wheel, or the metal worker's mould, he reproduces nature in a new form, adapting it to his purpose by an intelligence arising out of his knowledge as an artist and as a workman. In short, the adaptation of the natural type to a new material compels him to reproduce, almost create, as well as imitate — invent as well as copy”

George Wallis

design as well as draw! George Wallis. " Art Education for the people. No IV. The principles of Fine Art as Applied to Industrial Purposes http://books.google.com/books?id=l55GAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA231." In: People's & Howitt's Journal: Of Literature, Art, and Popular Progress, Vol. 3. John Saunders ed. 1847, p. 231.

Men, Beauty, Art, Intelligence

“People call me the painter of dancing girls. It has never occurred to them that my chief interest in dancers lies in rendering movement and painting pretty clothes.”

Edgar Degas (1834–1917) French artist

"As He Grows Old" (p. 87)
posthumous quotes, Degas: An Intimate Portrait' (1927)

People, Girl, Dance, Painting

“If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul; that alone matters; it is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features.”

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) French sculptor

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. VII. Of Yesterday and of to-day, p. 121

Soul

“.. can you [contemporary painters] ever get close, even vaguely, to the solidity, the transparency, the lyric strength of colour, to the clarity, the mystery, the emotion of any of the paintings of Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Dürer, Holbein or of young Raphael? Friends, have you ever realized that with the oil colours used today this is absolutely impossible?... In the museums of Europe I have observed the work of the Flemish painters at length – those earlier, later as well as contemporary to the [brothers] Van Eycks – and I am convinced that the above mentioned brothers were not the discoverers of oil paint in its true sense, as is held today, but that what they did was introduce oil in emulsion with other substances, especially live and fossil resins, into so-called oil tempera emulsion, which was already known in the Flanders, to enable them through the use of veiling to give a greater finish, cleanliness and strength of colour to their painting.
'These oils which are their tempera' said Vasari, speaking of the Flemish [painters] in his Life of Antonello; and without doubt he was alluding to Flemish oil tempera emulsion, but it is sure, absolutely sure, that.... we are dealing with.... a tempera based mixture (egg, glue, resin, tempera etc) in which oil was only used as a means of unity and for the finish of the painting.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's text 'Pro tempera oratio', c. 1920; from 'PRO TEMPERA ORATIO' http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/475-480Metafisica5_6.pdf, p. 475 1920s and later

Life, Sense, Painting

“When you get older as a painter and you've got the opportunities, the talent and the good fortune and have been provided with everything for getting old, then it's fantastic, because the same brushstroke that you put down is more mature and more poignant than it was when you were young.”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

Quote from a 1995 interview with Rudi Fuchs; in 'Appel, about growing older'; as quoted by Frank van der Ploeg, in 'The Low Countries'. Jaargang 12(2004) http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_low001200401_01/_low001200401_01_0027.php

“It is the poets and painters who react instantly to a new medium like radio or TV.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 53

“Of all the colors I ordered: the three chromes, the Prussian blue, the emerald, the crimson lakes, the malachite green, all the orange lead, hardly one of them is to be found on the Dutch palette, in Maris, in Mauve or Israels - [all contemporaries of Vincent, Dutch painters of the Hague School. ]”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Arles, France, Spring 1888; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 476), p 31 1880s, 1888

School, Color

“I know of only two painters in the world,' said a newly introduced feminine enthusiast to Whistler, 'yourself and Velasquez.' 'Why,' answered Whistler in dulcet tones, 'why drag in Velasquez?”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

D.C. Seitz, Whistler Stories (1913)
posthumous published

World

“Painting, in the beginning, was a trade like any other. Some men became picture-makers as others became glaziers or carpenters. Painters painted shields, saddles and banners. The primitive painter was more of a craftsman than we are; he learned his trade superlatively well before he thought of letting himself go. The reverse is true today.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

13 January 1857 (p. 339)
1831 - 1863, Delacroix' 'Journal' (1847 – 1863)

Men, Learning, Painting

“To select, combine and concentrate that which is beautiful in nature and admirable in art is as much the business of the landscape painter in his line as in the other departments of art.”

J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851) British Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker

Quote of Turner, c. 1810; as quoted in: Dennis Hugh Halloran (1970) The Classical Landscape Paintings of J.M.W. Turner. p. 75
1795 - 1820

Beauty, Art, Business, Nature

“My brother [the sculptor artist Raymond Duchamp-Villon had a kitchen in his little house in Puteaux, and he had the idea of decorating it with pictures by his buddies. He asked Gleizes, Metzinger, La Fresnaye, and I think Leger [all Cubist painters, then] to do some little paintings of the same size, like a sort of frieze. He asked me too, and I painted a coffee grinder which I made to explode.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote from: Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp, 1965; as cited in Futurism, ed. By Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 198
Duchamp's quote is referring to his painting 'Moulin a café', 1911 - many times reproduced from the lithography, made for the 1947 re-edition of Gleizes and Metzingers book 'Du Cubisme'
1951 - 1968

Coffee, Idea, Thinking, Painting

“There is a saying among those of us who have careers with the Council of Humanity that skiers, cooks, painters, and diplomats must work with what is in front of them.”

John Barnes book Earth Made of Glass

Earth Made of Glass (1998)

Cooking

“I recognize fully that you do not draw well, my dear Lucien [his son, also painter]. I told you any number of times that it is essential to have known forms in the eye and in the hand. It is only by drawing often, drawing everything, drawing incessantly, that one fine day you discover to your surprise that you have rendered something in its true character.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

In a letter, 1883, to his son Lucien; as quoted by C., & Rewald, in Camille Pissarro: Letters to his son Lucien, New York: Pantheon Books, 1943 p. 32
1880's

Time, Drawing

“The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract Expressionism started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 120

Way, Painting, Housing

“Do you like to see what can be transformed from a flat, elementary rural scene - bearing the stamp of nature, the mark of truth - into something most beautiful and graceful? Look at the works of our great [painter] Schelfhout. There you will find represented plain nature at the most elegant, but moreover with a faithfulness and truth, which only Schelfhout can represent.”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) Wilt gij zien wat er van een vlak, eenvoudig landelijk tafereel, als hetzelve den stempel der natuur, het merk der waarheid draagt, schoons en bevalligs kan gemaakt worden? Beschouwt dan de werken van onze grooten Schelfhout. Daarin zult gij de eenvoudige natuur op het sierlijkst, maar tevens met eene getrouwheid en waarheid, wat alleen een Schelfhout vermag, voorgesteld vinden.
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 243

Truth, Faith, Beauty, Nature

“Some painters [of the New York School], including myself, do not care what chair they are sitting on. It does not even have to be a comfortable one. They are too nervous to find out where they ought to sit. They do not want to 'sit in style'. Rather, they have found that painting - any kind of painting, any style of painting - to be painting at all, in fact - is a way of living today, a style of living, so to speak. That is where they form of it lies. It is exactly in its uselessness that it is free. Those artists do not want to conform. They only want to be inspired.”

Willem de Kooning (1904–1997) Dutch painter

Source: De Kooning's speech 'What Abstract Art means to me' on the symposium 'What is Abstract At' - at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 5 February, 1951, n.p.

School, Way, Painting

“Quote in Morandi's letter of 14 Oct. 1919 to the Futurist painter Carlo Carrà; as cited in Morandi 1894 – 1964, ed: M. C. Bandera & R. Miracco, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna, 2008; p. 92”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

1925 - 1945

Quotes

“The pursuit of perfection in art must always be a noble duty to the artist, but... Here [at the Drachenfels ] he feels, more than in any other place, too vividly his inability... Stop it, painter! Just please yourself with the impression it makes on your soul; try, if you can, to keep this impression pure, it will teach you how to create …”

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803–1862) painter from the Northern Netherlands

(original Dutch, citaat van B.C. Koekkoek:) Het streven naar volmaaktheid in den kunst moet den kunstenaar steeds een edelen pligt zijn, maar hier.. .Hier [bij de Drachenfels] gevoelt hij, meer dan op eenige andere plek, te levendig zijn onvermogen.. .Laat af, schilder! Vergenoeg u met den indruk dien het op uwe ziel maak; tracht, zo ge kunt, dezen rein te bewaren, het zal u leren scheppen..
Source: Herinneringen aan en Mededeelingen van…' (1841), p. 121

Art, Feeling, Soul, Perfection

“For the painter, for whom painting is a vital activity and a way of life — not merely a profession — such attitudes as we find in the histories are deadly. For him the only benefit, at least the deepest and most important benefit, which he can get from the study of the Masters comes from his capacity to see the painting in a thoroughly contemporary way. I mean in the present tense — the tense after all in which it was painted. Not for instance as an early this or a late that, nor as a good example of chiaroscuro or some other aesthetic or technical quality but as an immediately important human statement completely relevant to his life at the moment and convincing for that reason. If a work does not strike the painter in this way all further analysis of it will be futile.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

Italian Report (1955)

Life, Way, History, Study

“Novelists, playwrights, painters and others may hold in their heads the expectation of fame, but not poets. Having chosen that road, all one can dream of is the jealousy of one's rivals. Celebrity is unexpected and almost unseemly--it forces one to wear a constant look of chagrin, if that is possible. Unless you are Byron, who was the first poet to become a star. At its worst, fame means being known by strangers--enough to bring on waves of paranoia.”

Billy Collins (1941) American poet

Interview with Kritya: In the Name of Poetry

Jealousy, Dreams, Star

“I think all these new sculptors [after World War 2. ] – he Anthony Caro is not all that young though – are taking stand against abominable architecture since the war and I think rightly so. But again I feel it's not enough to be against something. You have to do something that will damn well replace it. Where do you put these sculptures?... I like to think that time is timeless and I wouldn't want to make a work which wouldn't last for more than ten years – nor a work that wouldn't go anywhere. It would make me terrible mad. Mind you, I have to wait to find for my work. It doesn't happen all that easily, but it does happen. It slips in somewhere. Before the war the architects were very much one with the sculptors, painters, everybody. We thought alike. Then the war was over.... the architects gave up coming to look at sculpture and painting.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), p. 22

War, World, Feeling, Thinking

“Turner is my great favourite of all the painters here. He combines the highest poetical imagination with an exquisite feeling for all the truth and individuality of nature; and he has shown that the ideal, as it is called, is not the improving of Nature, but the selecting and combining objects that are most in harmony and character with each other.”

Charles Robert Leslie (1794–1859) British painter (1794-1859)

Autobiographical Recollections of C. R. Leslie with Selections from his correspondence

Truth, Feeling, Imagination, Nature

“It was a beautiful embodied thought,
A dream of the fine painter, one of those
That pass by moonlight o'er the soul, and flit
'Mid the dim shades of twilight, when the eye
Grows tearful with its ecstasy.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(1st June 1822) Poetic Sketches. Second Series - Sketch the Fifth. Mr. Martin’s Picture of Clytie
8th June 1822) The Deserter see The Improvisatrice (1824
The London Literary Gazette, 1821-1822

Beauty, Dreams, Soul, Tear

“The running up of this queer flag caused much fear to the families of the Californians established in the neighborhood of Sonoma, Petaluma, and San Rafael, for they realized that the instigators of the uprising that had disturbed the tranquility of the frontier had made up their minds to rule, come what might, and, as the rumor had been spread far and wide that Ide and his associates had raised the bear flag in order to enjoy complete liberty and not be obliged to any civilized governments, the ranchers, who would have remained unperturbed should the American flag have been run up in Sonoma and who would have considered it as the harbinger of a period of progress and enlightenment, seized their machetes and guns and fled to the woods, determined to await a propitious moment for getting rid of the disturbers of the peace. Strange to relate, the first victim that the ranchers sacrificed was the painter of the "Bear Flag," young Thomas Cowie…”

Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo (1807–1890) Californian military commander, politician, and rancher

As quoted in The Literature of California: Native American beginnings to 1945 (2000) ed., Jack Hicks
Historical and Personal Memoirs Relating to Alta California (1875)

Fear, Family, Peace

“.. I also got to meet w:George Maciunas, the father of Fluxus. I wanted to know what this Fluxus was, so I asked him, 'If I put salt in a tea bag and then into hot water, then the salt will dissolve, and when you pull the bag up, there is nothing in it. Is that Fluxus?' 'Let’s make that one right away,' Maciunas replied. And it became a Fluxus object. I told him that I was a painter and that I would keep painting. 'Well,' he said, 'that doesn’t matter, as long as you do it the right way.”

Per Kirkeby (1938–2018) Danish artist

Getting to know him, I understood that the right way was with a certain sense of justice.
1995 and later, interview in Kirkeby’s home studio, Copenhagen (2012)

Justice, Way, Sense, Water

“The picture's substance reflects the painter's substance, showing how much he has felt of himself and his society, how much he spans and how deep his experience goes.”

Asger Jorn (1914–1973) Danish artist

1940 - 1948, Intimate Banalities' (1941)

“I did not come to know part II of 'Faust' until long after I made my illustrations, and even then only very superficially. It struck me as an ill-digested work, of little interest from the literary standpoint, but among those most calculated to inspire a painter owing to the mixture of characters and styles it contains... You asked what gave me the first idea of the Faust lithographs. I remember that about 1821 I saw the designs made by Retch [ Retzsch] and found them rather striking; but it was above all the performance of a dramatic opera on Faust that I saw in London in 1825 which stirred me to do something on the subject. The actor.... was a perfect Mephistopheles; he was fat, but that in no way diminished his nimbleness and his Satanic character.”

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) French painter

Quote in Delacroix' letter to Philippe Burty, 1 March 1862; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 76
Delacroix describes the source of his series Faust lithographs
1831 - 1863

Way, Idea, Parting, Perfection

“Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. The shadows which we shall paint shall be more luminous than the high-lights of our predecessors, and our pictures, next to those of the museums, will shine like blinding daylight, compared with deepest night. We conclude that painting cannot exist today without divisionism... w:Divisionism - [ Paul Signac initiated divisionism slightly earlier, together with Seurat ] - for the modern painter, must be an innate complementariness which we declare to be essential and necessary.”

Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) Italian painter and sculptor

As quoted in Futurism, ed. Didier Ottinger; Centre Pompidou / 5 Continents Editions, Milan, 2008, p. 92.
1910, Manifesto of Futurist Painters,' April 1910

Light, Painting, Night

“The desire of a poet for his writings to be in print is as natural as a painter needs to exhibit his work in public.”

Vernon Scannell (1922–2007) British boxer and poet

A Proper Gentleman, 1977

Nature

“A painter may know what he does not want.
But woe betide him if he wants to know
what he does want! A painter is lost if he finds himself.
The fact that he has succeeded in not finding
himself is regarded by Max Ernst as his only
'achievement.”

Max Ernst (1891–1976) German painter, sculptor and graphic artist

Quote from 'Max Ernst', exhibition catalogue, Galerie Stangl, Munich, 1967, U.S., pp.6-7, as cited in Edward Quinn, Max Ernst. 1984, Poligrafa, Barcelona. p. 12
1951 - 1976

“Dear Mr. Rosenberg - I was very surprised this morning that you refused to give me 2,000 fr. especially given that I had told you that my wife was gravely ill in Berlin and that I needed to leave immediately. You probably thought it was a tale I was telling you in order to shave some money off the sum that you owe me; to prove to you that this is not the case, I enclose with this letter a telegram that I received this morning. Strong though the crisis may be and as strongly as you may have applied the brakes, it is not possible that you are not able to find 1,000 fr. for a painter with whom you have done business for six years now and who (I dare hope) enjoys all your esteem; especially given that the said painter tells you that his wife is seriously ill and that he needs to leave.
I should tell you that in general the way you act in these times of crises is not particularly heroic.”

Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) Italian artist

Quote from De Chirico's letter to Mr. Rosenberg, Paris, 3 May, 1930; from LETTERS BY GIORGIO DE CHIRICO TO LÉONCE ROSENBERG, 1925-1939 http://www.fondazionedechirico.org/wp-content/uploads/309-338-Rosenberg_Metaphysical_Art_ENG.pdf, p. 329 1920s and later

Money, Hope, Way, Business

“A painter should never speak because words are not the means at his command. Words cannot express visually dimension at a glance they can only establish their own relationship in time.
However, it is possible for a painter, at certain moments of his development to formulate some of the problems he is facing in the growth of his work. A painting cannot be explained. Words can only stimulate the act of looking.
A visual problem is never put a priori as a mathematical problem but is born in the process of painting and evolves in a state of unawareness of the painter.”

Fritz Glarner (1899–1972) Swiss artist

Source: George L. K. Morris, Willem De Kooning, Alexander Calder, Fritz Glarner, Robert Motherwell, Stuart Davis. " What Abstract Art Means to Me http://www.jstor.org/stable/4058250," in: The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 18, No. 3, (Spring, 1951), pp. 2-15

Mathematics, Problem, Time, Painting

“Photography is not an art. Neither is painting, nor sculpture, literature or music. They are only different media for the individual to express his aesthetic feelings... You do not have to be a painter or a sculptor to be an artist. You may be a shoemaker. You may be creative as such. And, if so, you are a greater artist than the majority of the painters whose work is shown in the art galleries of today.”

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946) American photographer

'Is Photography a Failure?', Alfred Stieglitz, 'Sun: 5.', March 14, 1922; as quoted on Wikipedia

Art, Music, Feeling, Literature

“Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?' We're given the springboard of the text, a plane ticket, told to report to Alabama, and there's a group of people all ready to make a film and it's a marvelous life.”

Albert Finney (1936–2019) English actor

Interview with Paul Fischer at Dark Horizons (2 December 2003).

Life, People

“I think half the point of painting a picture is that you don't know what will happen … that if painters did know what was going to happen they wouldn't bother to do it.”

Lucian Freud (1922–2011) British painter and engraver

Interview with Martin Gayford, Independent on Sunday 26 May 2002
Other

Thinking, Painting

“The future painter must feel what is useful for his development – drawing or even sculpture everything that will let him become one with Nature, identify himself with her, by entering into the things – which is what I call Nature – that arouse his feelings. I believe study by means of drawing is most essential. If drawing is of the Spirit and color of the Senses, you must draw first, to cultivate the spirit and to be able to lead color into spiritual paths.”

Henri Matisse (1869–1954) French artist

In a letter to Mr. Clifford, February 14, 1948; as quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Ghiberti to Gainsborough, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, pp. 238-239
1940s

Color, Feeling, Nature, Sense

“I ought to respect myself for my friends' sake, and my children's. It is time, at fifty-six, to begin, at least, to know oneself, — and I do know what I am not, and your regard for me has at least awakened me to believe in the possibility that I may yet make some impression with my "light" — my "dews" — my "breezes" — my bloom and freshness, — no one of which qualities has yet been perfected on the canvas of any painter in the world.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to C.R. Leslie (March 1833), from The Letters of John Constable, R.A. to C. R. Leslie, R.A. 1826-1837 (Constable & Co., 1931), p. 104
1830s

Children, World, Light, Time

“I was never the kind of painter or sculptor who kept a shop.”

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet

As quoted in In Our Time : The Artist, BBC Radio 4 (28 March 2002).

“I'm Bill Allred, Painter of Light.”

Bill Allred

Former Sign-off

Light

“The painter who loves his art is ruler in his own kingdom, even if he be in Lilliput and a Lilliputian himself. He transforms a kitchen maid in to a fairy, and a great lady into a brothel matron, if he wants to and sees them so, for he is a seer. His vision includes everything that is alive in the past.”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Quotes, 1940-1950, Stella Vespertina. (1947)

Love, Art, Past

“He [Richter's art-mate, the German painter Sigmar Polke ] was very different, he was not cool... He had irony. He was very funny. The things we did together [around 1963 – 1970] were a kind of craziness... We thought everything was so stupid and we refused to participate. That was the basis of our understanding.... he was able to paint those little dots in his raster paintings by hand with such a patience while he was living with his two children and his wife in a small subsidized apartment.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), pp. 45-46, note 43

Children, Stupidity, Art, Understanding

“It was only in the evenings that I played the violin [c. 1999-1901, to earn his money for living]. During the day I was free to spend my time as I wished. With a few colours in a box, a canvas and a cheap easel under my arm, I would make my way to the Banks of the Seine... I painted to restore my peace of mind, to calm my desires and, above all, to purify myself a little... Make a career of painting. How I would have laughed if someone had talked to me about that! To be a painter is not a profession, no more than being an anarchist or a lover, a race-track rider..”

Maurice de Vlaminck (1876–1958) French painter

Source: Quotes dated, Dangerous Corner', 1929, p. 66

Money, Peace, Way, Lovers

“I would say off the cuff that I am an anxious person. I worry about everything. I need to know everything. I tend to live in a state of anxiety with the feeling that life is some kind of great catastrophe. I feel the desire, or rather the intense need, to do something useful for society, and that is what stimulates me. In every situation I always look for what is positive and beneficial for my fellow citizens. I am interested in study, reflection, philosophy — but always as a dilettante. I also consider myself a dilettante as a painter.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

As quoted in "Antoni Tapies" by Serafin Garcia Ibanez in the UNESCO Courier (June 1994) http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1310/is_1994_June/ai_15630919/print?tag=artBody;col1. 1991 - 2000

Life, Feeling, Study, Personality

“.. I am so often showing my work in Germany that I belong to the German moderns... I openly want to confess you that I don't value the new painting in my home country very much. That is why I don't have a lot of acquaintances among the painters. Everything here is so little progressive. People's life is to easy here. It is very difficult to keep wide-awake since all are sleeping here. I feel much more at home in Germany.”

Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) Dutch painter

translation from Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
version in Dutch / citaat van Jacoba van Heemskerck, in het Nederlands vertaald: ..ik ben zo vaak met mijn werk in Duitsland dat ik helemaal tot de Duitse modernen behoor.. .Ik wil u openlijk bekennen dat ik de nieuwe schilderkunst in mijn vaderland niet erg hoog aansla. Daarom heb ik ook niet erg veel kennissen onder de schilders. Alles is hier zo weinig vooruitstrevend. De mensen herbben het veel te goed. Het is erg moeilijk wakker te blijven aangezien allen hier slapen. In Duitsland voel ik me veel meer thuis.
Quote of Jacoba van Heemskerck, in a letter of June 1921 to prof de:Hans Hildebrandt, Stuttgart Germany; as cited in Jacoba van Heemskerck van Beest, 1876 – 1923: schilderes uit roeping, A. H. Huussen jr. (ed. Marleen Blokhuis), (ISBN: 90-400-9064-5Waanders, Zwolle, 2005, p. 179
1920's

Life, People, Feeling, Home

“I considered that the painter's personality should be kept out of things, and therefore pictures should be anonymous. It was I who decided that pictures should not be signed, and for a time Picasso did the same. I thought that from the moment someone else could do the same as myself, there was no difference between the pictures and they should not be signed. Afterwards I realized it was not so and began to sign my pictures again. Picasso had begun again anyhow. I realized that one cannot reveal oneself without mannerism, without some evident trace of one's personality. But all the same one should not go too far in that direction..”

Georges Braque (1882–1963) French painter and sculptor

Source: 1946 - 1963, In conversation with Dora Vallier' (1954), p. 265

Time, Personality

“Contact with like-minded painters, a group means a great deal to me: nothing comes in isolation. We have worked out our ideas largely by talking them through... One depends on one's surroundings. And so the exchange with other artists – and especially the collaboration with Lueg and Polke – matters a lot to me.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 47

Idea, Dependency

“My friend Bonner has just set off to Charlotte Street to pack your picture (an old painting) and forward it; it is a beautiful representation of a summer's evening; calm, warm and delicious; the colour on the man's face is perfect sunshine. The liquid pencil of this school is replete with a beauty peculiar to itself. Nevertheless, I don't believe they had any 'nostrums,' but plain linseed oil; 'honest linseed' as old Wilson called it. But it is always right to remember that the ordinary painters of that day used, as now, the same vehicle as their betters, and also that their works have all received the hardening and enamelling effects of time, so that we must not judge of originality by these signs always.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from John Constable's letter to Rev. John Fisher (20 December 1833), as quoted in Richard Friedenthal, Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock (Thames and Hudson, London, 1963), pp. 45-46
1830s

School, Beauty, Time, Summer

“The Dada movement was an anti-movement which corresponded to a need born of the first World War. Although neither literary nor pictorial in essence, Dada found its exponents in painters and writers scattered all over the world. Max Ernst's activities in Cologne in 1917 made him the foremost representative of the Dada painters. Between 1919 and 1921 his paintings, drawings and collages depicting the world of the subconscious were already a foretaste of Surrealism... In fact his previous achievements had certainly influenced, to a great extent, the literary Surrealist exploration of the subconscious.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote in 'Appreciations of other artists': Max Ernst (painter, sculptor author) 1945, by Marcel Duchamp; as cited in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159
1921 - 1950

War, World, Drawing, Painting

“I have seen pictures [on the Salon of Brussel, 1860], of which I had never dreamed and in which I found all that my heart desires, all that I nearly always miss in the Dutch painters. Troyon, Courbet, Diaz, Dupré [all painters of the School of Barbizon, Robert Fleury have made a great impression on me. I am a good Frenchman, therefore; but, as Simon van den Berg says, it is just because I am a good Frenchman that I am a good Dutchman, since the great Frenchmen of today and the great Dutchmen of the past have much in common. Unity, restfulness, earnestness and, above all, an inexplicable intimacy with nature are what struck me most in these pictures. There were certainly also a few good Dutch pieces, but, generally speaking, when you place them next to the great Parisians, they lack that mellowness, that quality which, so to speak, resembles the deep tones of an organ. And yet this luxurious manner came originally from Holland, from our steaming, fat-coloured Holland! They were courageous pictures; there was a heart and a soul in them.”

Gerard Bilders (1838–1865) painter from the Netherlands

Quote from Bilders in his letter (End of 1860); as cited in Dutch Art in the Nineteenth Century – 'The Hague School; Introduction' https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dutch_Art_in_the_Nineteenth_Century/The_Hague_School:_Introduction, by G. Hermine Marius, transl. A. Teixera de Mattos; publish: The la More Press, London, 1908 1860's

School, Dreams, Soul, Courage

“These days there are painters that go inside a factory in order to be inspired by the noise of machines, so that it affects their works. Of course, artists need sensibility; sensibility towards their environment and their community, but when they are stirred enough by their experiences in their society they can create their art in small studios.”

Guity Novin (1944) artist

Source: Negin (1971), p. 57

Art, Communication

“The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity, an identity for me, but an identity big enough for everyone to share in. Isn't that what it's all about?!”

Frank Stella (1936) American artist

Quote, 1960's; as quoted in The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 307
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Idea

“Often we were joined by Maurice Princet. Although very young, he held an important post in an insurance company which he owed to his knowledge of mathematics. But outside his profession it was as an artist that he thought of mathematics, as a specialist in aesthetics that he evoked continuities in n dimensions. He liked to interest painters in the new visions of space that had been opened up by Victor Schlegel and several others. He succeeded. After having heard him by chance, Henri Matisse was caught reading an essay on hyperspace. Oh! it was only a potboiler [un ouvrage de vulgarisation]! but at least that shows that for the great 'fauve' the days of the painter who knows nothing, who runs towards a pretty subject with his beard blowing in the wind, was passed.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Mathematics, Knowledge, Chance, Reading

“Artists encounter the landscape they propose to paint — they look at it, observe it from this angle and that. They are, as we say, absorbed in it. Or, in the case of abstract painters, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Ch 2 : The Nature of Creativity, p. 41
The Courage to Create (1975)

Color, Idea, Painting

“What to leave out is the first thing the artist has to decide; a painter who “held the mirror up to nature” would spend his life on the leaves of one landscape. The work of art’s fluctuating and idiosyncratic threshold of attention—the great things disregarded, the small things seized and dwelt on—is as much of a signature as anything in it.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“The Profession of Poetry”, p. 162
Kipling, Auden & Co: Essays and Reviews 1935-1964 (1980)

Life, Art, Nature

“You use things; the idea is, of course, to eliminate things [in making a picture]. And just as fifteen or eighteen years ago [when Guston made whole figurative series of children's pictures: 'all sort of props and so on'] I stretched out to get that, - put it in and took it out - to get that look in that's kid's eye and the way his mouth was open or wasn't - I mean a very particular kind of look - I'd do the same now. In other words, I can't find any freedom in abstract painting [but Guston did abstract painting in 1960 - till in 1967 he moved to figuration]. I'am just as stuck with locations, a few areas of colour in relation to some kind of totality that I want, as I was before. And so the problem of figuration is somehow irrelevant to me. I think some of the best painting done in New York today is figuration, but it's not recognised as such... Well I think of my pictures as a kind of figuration... I think every good painter here in New York really paints a self-portrait..”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

Source: 1950 - 1960, Interview with David Sylvester, BBC (March 1960), pp. 92-93

Children, Way, Idea, Problem

“It is possible to become a painter, a sculptor, or a musician by study, but not a dramatic poet; a man is so either at once or never, as he is blonde or brown, and cannot help it.”

Alexandre Dumas, fils (1824–1895) French writer and dramatist, son of the homonym writer and dramatist

On peut devenir un peintre, un sculpteur, un musicien même à force d'étude; on ne devient pas un auteur dramatique. On l'est tout de suite ou jamais, comme on est blond ou brun, sans le vouloir.
Preface to Le Père Prodigue (1859), in Théatre complet de Al. Dumas fils (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1868-98) vol. 3, p. 199; translation by E. P. Evans from The Atlantic Monthly, May 1890, pp. 584-5.

Study, Help

“Sane judgment abhors nothing so much as a picture perpetrated with no technical knowledge, although with plenty of care and diligence. Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist; but the blame for this should be laid upon their masters, who are themselves ignorant of this art.”

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) German painter, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist

The Art of Measurement (1525).

Art, Error, Knowledge

“I am anxious that the world should be inclined to look to painters for information about painting. I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic; that imagination alone never did, and never can, produce works that are to stand by a comparison with realities;; and to show, by tracing the connecting links in the history of landscape painting, that no great painter was ever self-taught.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Quote from 'The History of Landscape Painting,' first lecture, Royal Institution (26 May 1836), from notes taken by C.R. Leslie
1830s, his lectures History of Landscape Painting (1836)

World, Hope, Imagination, History

“I've always been told that I was a painter's painter... What does that mean?... That painters like my painting and the big wide world overlooks it, I suppose?... Well, I know... To me, it would have meant that - this is pre this new rage in buying and selling paintings - that, I think, that the formal values, like light, space, color, all those things that a painting is made up of, as well as the Jacob going up the ladder or Venus on the half shell or something [chuckles] would be what interested the painter. And perhaps the public would want the picture of the Christ child, so to speak. You know what I mean.”

Joan Mitchell (1925–1992) American painter

Tape number two, side A
1975 - 1992, Oral history interview with Joan Mitchell, 1986

World, Color, Thinking, Light

“To imagine is the characteristic act, not of the poet's mind, or the painter's, or the scientist's, but of the mind of man.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Imagination

“Those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists — the dramatists, the musicians, the painters, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images — poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: The Courage to Create (1975), Ch. 1 : The Courage to Create, p. 22

Imagination

“But where does by far the bulk, the whole ambulance load, of pain really come from? Where must it come from? Isn't the true poet or painter a seer? Isn't he, actually, the only seer we have on earth? Most apparently not the scientist, most emphatically not the psychiatrist.”

Jerome David Salinger book Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction (1963), Seymour: An Introduction (1959)

Pain

“Van Gogh is congenial to me, 'Vincent' in his letters. Perhaps nature does have something. There is no need, after all, to speak of the smell of earth; it has too peculiar a savor. The words we use to speak about it, I mean, have too peculair a savor. Too bad that the early Van Gogh was so fine a human being, but not so good as a painter, and that the later, wonderful artist is such a marked man. A mean should be found between these four points pf comparison: then, yes!”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1908), # 808, in The Diaries of Paul Klee; University of California Press, 1964; as quoted by Francesco Mazzaferro, in 'The Diaries of Paul Klee - Part Three' : Klee as a Secessionist and a Neo-Impressionist Artist http://letteraturaartistica.blogspot.nl/2015/05/paul-klee-ev.html 1903 - 1910

Nature

“Shall the painter then.... decide upon painting? Shall he be the critic and sole authority? Aggressive as is this supposition, I fear that, in the length of time, his assertion alone has established what even the gentleman of the quill accept as the canons of art, and recognize as the masterpieces of work. Seurat's painting of the Grande Jatte proved extremely influential.”

James McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) American-born, British-based artist

quote of Whistler, (1892) In: Gentle Art of making Enemies, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1922, p. 30
1870 - 1903

Fear, Art, Time, Painting

“You haven't time to think about the composition. In working directly from nature, the painter ends up by simply aiming at an effect, and not composing the picture at all; and he soon becomes monotonous.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

(before 1880) As quoted in Renoir – his life and work, Francois Fosca, Book Club Associates /Thames and Hudson Ltd, London 1975, p. 176
undated quotes, Renoir – his life and work, 1975

Nature, Thinking, Time

“Art is not the possession of the few who are recognized writers, painters, musicians; it is the authentic expression of any and all individuality. Those who have the gift of creative expression in unusually large measure disclose the meaning of the individuality of others to those others. In participating in the work of art, they become artists in their activity. They learn to know and honor individuality in whatever form it appears. The fountains of creative activity are discovered and released. The free individuality which is the source of art is also the final source of creative development in time.”

John Dewey (1859–1952) American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer

Time and Individuality (1940)

Art, Learning, Appearance, Time

“I am not as these are, the poet saith
In youth's pride, and the painter, among men
At bay, where never pencil comes nor pem”

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–1882) English poet, illustrator, painter and translator

from Not As These in The House of Life 1870 kindle ebook ASIN B0082R81E8

Men, Youth

“One of the loveliest daughters of that land,
Divinest Greece! that taught the painter's hand
To give eternity to loveliness;
One of those dark-eyed maids, to whom belong
The glory and the beauty of each Song
Thy poets breathed, for it was theirs to bless
With life the pencil and the lyre's dreams,
Giving reality to visioned gleams
Of bright divinities.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Leander and Hero from The London Literary Gazette (22nd February 1823)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Life, Beauty, Dreams, Reality

“Kandinsky was connected with Die Brücke and the Blue Rider: they had a concept and created a reality. But I prefer Jean Fautrier [French painter-artist; 1898 - 1965] with his suffering and self-absorption. And his purpose on bringing about changes was just as strong. As a result I see in Fautrier a stronger paradigm than in Kandinsky..”

Anselm Kiefer (1945) German painter and sculptor

(1986) n.p.
Structures are no longer valid', in "Ein Gespräch..."

Reality, Strong, Suffering, Change

“What surprising fellows those French painters are. A Millet, Delacroix, Corot, Troyon, Daubigny, Rousseau, and a Daumier.... Something else about Delacroix - he had a discussion with a friend about the question of working absolutely from nature, and said on that occasion that one should take one's 'studies' from nature - but that the 'actual painting' had to be made 'by heart'. This friend was walking along the boulevard when they had this discussion - which was already fairly heated. When they parted the other man was still not entirely persuaded. After they parted, Delacroix let him stroll on for a bit - then (making a trumpet of his two hands) bellowed after him in the middle of the street - to the consternation of the worthy passers-by:
'By heart! By heart!”

Vincent Van Gogh (1853–1890) Dutch post-Impressionist painter (1853-1890)

(Par coeur! Par coeur!) I can't tell you how much I enjoyed reading this article and some other things about Delacroix.. In his letter to Anthon van Rappard, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, 8 and c. 15 August 1885 - original manuscript, letter 526, at Van Gogh Museum, location Amsterdam - inv. nos. b8390 V/2006, http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letters/let526/letter.html See for this anecdote, taken from Charles Blanc, Les artistes de mon temps, letter 496, n. 7. 1880s, 1885

Question, Nature, Study, Reading

“The peasants have their painters, Millet, Jaque, Breton; and that is a good thing.... Well and good: but between you and me, the bourgeois walking along the jetty towards the sunset, has just as much right to be caught on canvas, 'to be brought to the light'... They too are often resting after a day's hard work, these people who come from their offices and from behind their desks... There's a serious and irrefutable argument.”

Eugène Boudin (1824–1898) French painter

Quote from Bonnard's letter to Ferdinand Martin, 3 September 1868; as cited in Eugène Boudin, G. Jean-Aubry with Robert Schmit - trans. Caroline Tisdall. Greenwich, Conn., New York Graphic Society, 1968, p. 72
1850s - 1870s

People, Light

“Feminism, for all its boasts, has not found a single major female painter or sculptor to add to the canon. It did revive the reputations of many minor women, like Frida Kahlo or Romaine Brooks. Mary Cassatt, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Helen Frankenthaler were already known and did not need rediscovery. Artemisia Gentileschi was simply a polished, competent painter in a Baroque style created by men.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "The New Sexism: Liberating Art and Beauty", p. 115

Women, Men

“I have applied for a pass and I am going to travel through Western Europe for 5 days. [I] start in Cologne and will probably end in Paris. Who cares. In Cologne there is a large exhibition of German painters [especially Die Brücke-artists]. Jan W. [= Jan Wiegers, who knew Kirchner very well since 1920] has been there and animated so much that I'm going there for a while.... it seems that Jan wants to come with me. He was so enthusiastic that I suspect to be able to note him as my traveling companion.”

Hendrik Werkman (1882–1945) Dutch artist

version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Hendrik Werkman, in het Nederlands): Ik heb een pas aangevraagd en ga West-Europa in 5 dagen afreizen. Begin in Keulen en eindig vermoedelijk in Parijs. Wie doet je wat. In Keulen is een groote tentoonstelling van Duitse schilders [met name van Die Brücke]. Jan W. [= nl:Jan Wiegers] is er geweest en animeerde zoodanig dat ik er even heen ga.. ..'t schijnt dat Jan met me mee wil. Hij was zo enthousiast dat ik vermoed hem als reisgezel te kunnen noteren.
Quote van Werkman, in his letter to Cor Spruit, 14 August, 1929; as cited in H. N. Werkman - Leven & Werk - 1882-1945, ed. A. de Vries, J. van der Spek, D. Sijens, M. Jansen; WBooks, Groninger Museum / Stichting Werkman, 2015 (transl: Fons Heijnsbroek), p. 110
After this trip Werkman made a series of prints from the Paris' metro: 'D-67' and 'D-69'
1920's

Travel, Animals

“Papa painted small landscapes by the river in Coyoacán, and copied sentimental paintings in watercolour and oil. Afterwards, he gave me a little box of paints that belonged to him. Ángel Salas gave me a small book that told me how to prepare the canvases, and I made them smooth, smooth. The courtship with Gómez Arias lasted from 1922 until 1925, when the bus crushed us both. Gómez Arias brought me books on painting and painters from Europe. These were the first books on art that fell into my hands.”

Frida Kahlo (1907–1954) Mexican painter

1950
Source: 1946 - 1953, "Song of herself"; interviews by Olga Campos, Sept. 1950, Chapter 'My Painting', p. 73

Books, Art, Painting, Box

“Miro came of age as an artist just at the time World War 1. ended. With the end of the war came the end of all the new pre-war art conceptions. A young painter could not start as a Cubist or a Futurist, and Dada was the only manifestation at the moment. Miro began by painting farm scenes from the countryside of Barcelona, his native land... A few years later he came to Paris [circa 1914] and found himself among the Dadaists who were, at that time, transmuting into Surrealism. In spite of this contact Miró kept aloof from any direct influence and showed a series of canvases in which form submitted to strong colouring expressed a new two-dimensional cosmogony, in no way related to abstraction.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

Quote in: 'Appreciations of other artists': Joan Miro (painter, sculptor author) 1946, by Marcel Duchamp; as cited in Catalog, Collection of the Societé Anonyme, eds. Michel Sanouillet / Elmer Peterson, London 1975, pp. 143- 159
1921 - 1950

War, Age, World, Art

“This period of blue monochrome was the product of my pursuit of the indefinable in painting which that master, Eugène Delacroix [Romantic French painter] was able to indicate even in his day.”

Yves Klein (1928–1962) French artist

In 1957; p. 33
before 1960, "Yves Klein, 1928 – 1962, Selected Writings"

Painting

“If I had not become a painter,
I would surely have become a clown..
.. because I make people laugh..
.. Faces deformed
by suffering, humour or work.
Often crazy. They then became imaginary,
when I adorned them with movements
free colours depending on the head. The
colour too become clown-like”

Karel Appel (1921–2006) Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet

AF, 73; p. 161
Karel Appel, a gesture of colour' (1992/2009)

People, Suffering, Dependency

“Right up until today Pollock [her husband and famous painter; died Aug. 1956] well takes a lot of mine time…. and while you ask 'How much did it take out of me as a creative artist', I ask simultaneously, 'What did it give?' It is a two-way affair at all times. I would give anything to have someone giving me what I was able to give Pollock.”

Lee Krasner (1908–1984) American artist

Source: Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists 1975, p. 79.

Way, Time

“To a large extent, the problems of poets are the problems of painters, and poets must often turn to the literature of painting for a discussion of their own problems.”

Wallace Stevens (1879–1955) American poet

Opus Posthumous (1955), Adagia

Literature, Problem, Painting

“Watching the painter painting
And all the time, the light is changing
And he keeps painting
That bit there, it was an accident
But he's so pleased
It's the best mistake, he could make
And it's my favourite piece.
It's just great.”

Kate Bush (1958) British recording artist; singer, songwriter, musician and record producer

Song lyrics, Aerial (2005), A Sky of Honey (Disc 2)

Light, Change, Time, Painting

“[I wish]to engrave and distribute [the prints] for the benefit and knowledge and use of painters and sculptors and other knowledge-able persons.”

Titian (1488–1576) Italian painter

official document, 1567; as quoted by Bruce Kohl in Titian and Venetian Painting, 1450-1590; publishers Westview Press, 1999, p. 117
In 1567 Titian applied to the Venetian senate for a fifteen-year copyright privilege for engravings, made after his work. The Dutch artist Cornelis Cort produced prints after Titian's work, all made in collaboration, in 1555-56 and 1571-72
1541-1576

Knowledge, Personality

“What is a portrait good for, unless it shows just how the subject was seen by the painter? In the old days before photography came in a sitter had a perfect right to say to the artist: "Paint me just as I am." Now if he wishes absolute fidelity he can go to the photographer and get it.”

Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) English illustrator and author

As quoted in Aubrey Beardsley : A Biography (1999) by Matthew Sturgis, p. 189

Painting, Perfection

“Sloan [American colleague artist who started his art by making etchings, c. 1920] not having been abroad [in contrary to Hopper himself], has seen these things with a truer and fresher eye than most... The hard early training has given to Sloan a facility and a power of invention that the pure painter seldom achieves.”

Edward Hopper (1882–1967) prominent American realist painter and printmaker

posthumous
Source: 'Joan Sloan' Hopper', p. 172; as quoted in Edward Hopper, Gail Levin, Bonfini Press, Switzerland 1984, p. 39

Art, Training

“A painter who loves his art must be careful not to see too much of critics and men of letters. These gentlemen, however unconsciously, distort everything, thinking that they are explaining it—the artist's thought, sensibility, and intensions. They take away his strength, just as Delilah took away Samson's. They have no gift for nuances, and they have an instinctive aversion for everything that is beyond their reach and baffles them.”

Georges Rouault (1871–1958) French painter

Soliloques. (1944)
Quotes, 1940-1950

Love, Men, Art, Thinking

“It remains true that Michelangelo's intensely personal use of the nude greatly altered its character. He changed it from a means of embodying ideas to a means of expressing emotions; he transformed it from the world of living to the world of becoming. And he projected his world of the imagination with such unequaled artistic power that its shadow fell on every male nude in art for three hundred and fifty years. Painters either imitated his heroic poses and proportions or they reacted against them self-consciously and sought a new repertoire of attitudes in the art of fifth-century Greece. In the nineteenth century the ghost of Michelangelo was still posing the models in art schools.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

World, School, Art, Imagination

“I have a definite feeling for the West, the vast horizontality of the land, for instance... I have always been very impressed with the plastic qualities of American Indian art. The Indians have the true painter's approach in their capacity to get hold of appropriate images, and in their understanding of what constitutes painterly subject-matter. Their colour is essentially Western, their vision has the basic universality of all real art. Some people find references to American Indian art and calligraphy in parts of my pictures. That wasn't intentional; probably [it] was the result of early memories and enthusiasm.”

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) American artist

Quote of Pollock, from Twentieth-century American painting, Gail Levin, The Thyssen-Bornemisza collection. London, 1987, p. 267
1940's, Art and Architecture (1944)

People, Art, Feeling, Understanding

“Whether it is Juan Gris taking objects apart, Picasso replacing them with objects of his own invention, or another who replaces conical perspective by a system based on the relations between perpendiculars, all that only goes to show that Cubism was not at all born out of an authoritative theory [mot d'ordre]; that it only marked among a few painters the will to be finished with an art that never ought to have survived the condemnation pronounced upon it by Pascal.”

Jean Metzinger (1883–1956) French painter

Cubism was born

Art

“Composer, sculptor, painter, poet, prophet, sage, these are the makers of the after-world, the architects of heaven.”

James Allen (1864–1912) British philosophical writer

As A Man Thinketh (1902), Visions and Ideals

World

“Technical criticism in particular is the despair of the artist. No one but an idiot would offer a poet his comments in terms of spondees and trochees; why must the painter daily suffer the indignity? Any picture which makes one conscious first of its technical qualities, good or bad, is not a good picture, whatever else it may be.”

Patrick Swift (1927–1983) British artist

The Artist Speaks (1951)

Suffering, Despair

“You [the interviewer Edouard Roditi, in 1958] have probably understood that I had always been mainly a plain-air painter, though I also painted portraits and still-life compositions. At first I experienced great difficulty with my brushwork – I mean with that the French call 'la touche de pinceau'. So Kandinsky taught me how to achieve the effects that I wanted with a palette knife. In the view from my window in Sèvres, that I painted in 1906, when we were together in France, you can see how well he taught me. Later of course, here in Murnau, I learned to handle brushes, too, but I managed this by following Kandinsky's example, first with a palette knife, than with brushes.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

Source: Interview by Edouard Roditi (1958), p. 120

Life, Learning, Painting

“The painter is turning his eyes towards us only in so far as we happen to occupy the same position as his subject. We, the spectators, are an additional factor. Though greeted by that gaze, we are also dismissed by it, replaced by that which was always there before we were: the model itself. But, inversely, the painter's gaze, addressed to the void confronting him outside the picture, accepts as many models as there are spectators; in this precise but neutral place, the observer and the observed take part in a ceaseless exchange.”

Michel Foucault (1926–1984) French philosopher

Las Menias
The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970)

Parting

“A fresh river in a beautiful meadow
Imagined in his mind
The good Painter, who would some day paint it”

Jeff VanderMeer book City of Saints and Madmen

"The Transformation of Martin Lake", epigram, p. 130
City of Saints and Madmen (2001–2004)

Beauty, Imagination, Painting

“In war we are all equal, but among a thousand good men, a bullet hit an irreplaceable one... We painters know well that with the loss of his harmony [ of August Macke ], the color in German art will become many shades paler..”

Franz Marc (1880–1916) German painter

Quote of Franz Marc, in exhibition-text 'Die Blaue Reiter', Gemeentemuseum the Hague, Netherlands 2010
c. 1914/15, on the death of his close friend August Macke, who fell in the first months of World War 1.
1915 - 1916

Men, War, Art, Color

“[On the question: 'What was your main stylistic influence up to this time']: The Renaissance chiefly - Piero, Mantegna, Uccello - but I was attracted also by the modern idioms - Léger, Picasso - and was close to the abstract painters on the project such as Stuart Davis, Burgoyne Diller, Arshile Gorky, Balcomb Greene, etc. At the time I did the Queens project, there was already a marked change in my work - it was becoming more concerned with cubist concepts of treating space.”

Phillip Guston (1913–1980) American artist

n.p.
1961 - 1980, Oral history interview with Philip Guston, 1965 January 29

Question, Change, Time

“[question: How do you interpret your role as a painter in our society? ] As a role that everyone has. I would like to try to understand what is. We know very little, and I am trying to do it by creating analogies. Almost every work of art is an analogy. When I make a representation of something, this too is an analogy to what exists; I make an effort to get a grip on the thing by depicting it. I prefer to steer clear of anything aesthetic, so as not to set obstacles in my own way and not to have the problem of people saying: 'Ah, yes, that's how he sees the world, that's his interpretation.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Quote from the interview with Rolf-Gunter Dienst, 1970; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1 1970's

People, World, Art, Way

“I am settled in France, and as for the rest of my history as a painter, it is bound up with the impressionistic group.”

Camille Pissarro (1830–1903) French painter

his remark, circa 1856; as quoted in Brush and Pencil, Vol. XIII, no. 6 , article: 'Camille Pissarro' Impressionist'; by Henry G Stephens, March, 1904, p. 412-13
quote of Pissarro, after his stay of three year without success in Venezuela, and returning back to Paris
1850's + 1860's

History

Quotes about painter page 3

Quotes about painter
page 3